Over the past few months my friends have been telling me I should start a blog. So here it is. I don’t pretend to be a good writer, but i’m here to share the journey to my first marathon and beyond.

My name is Hailey, but my friends call me Hails or Napster. I work full time for a large accounting firm in Sydney, and I also run my own part-time mobile personal training business which has been up and running for almost 4 months. I am also a Nike Run Leader with the Pitt St Sydney store 2 nights a week, however I am no running expert as I have only been running again for the past 18 months.

As a kid I did a lot of sport and I did not sit still, i’m sure my mother was relieved when I finally got my license and could drive myself around to training, carnivals and the many team sports I played. At one point I think I was in 7 Netball teams, 4 Volleyball Teams and that was when I was studying my HSC. It was a busy but fun part of my life.

There is a lot of other information that I could write here about my life up untill this point, but the City2Surf is where my running journey first began, so I thought it appropriate to be the main subject of my first post.

In 2007 I entered the City2Surf, one of Australia’s biggest fun runs, if not the biggest. I planned to walk the 14km track with a friend and that’s exactly what I did. It took us 2 hours & 46 minutes and it was so beautiful crossing the finish line next to Bondi Beach under a clear blue sky. I made a promise to myself that I would run it next year.

In the lead up to the 2008 City2Surf I had not done any running. I had however been playing some netball and cycling long distances on weekends. I did not feel prepared and when I was struck by a cold/flu 2 weeks before the race I thought I might have to pull out. But the thought of all the money I had raised to help the Lupus Association of NSW kept me on track and I made it to the start line. I was ‘Back of the Pack’, and for anyone who has run the City2Surf you will have felt my pain. For the first 5km it felt like all I did was duck and weave in and out of people going all different paces and in all different directions, I could not find my rhythm. Eventually people started to drop back and I had to walk up Heartbreak Hill, this seemed to be the spot where people started thinning out. And then I found my stride, I finally got some momentum and slowly ran the second half of the race finishing in 1 hour and 31 minutes. Could I beat this time next year?

For several years I ran sporadically with no set plan and continued to improve my City2Surf time each year, eventually setting a PB of 1 hour 19 minutes in 2012 – a time to hope to beat this year!

Please feel free to ask questions on anything you see posted here and I will happily try to answer them. I hope you enjoy my posts, happy running 🙂

Celebrating another finish on the beautiful Bondi Beach